


Behind Us the Moon, in a Welter of Blood

by TheBitterKitten



Series: Celestial Bodies [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Dark Will Graham, Ingram gets what he deserves, M/M, Murder Husbands, Murder Husbands a-murdering, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Soft Hannibal, hannibal is basically a murder concierge, hannibal is so in love, will graham has an empathy disorder and it shows, will is so in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-07-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:21:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,392
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25617286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheBitterKitten/pseuds/TheBitterKitten
Summary: Will gets absolutely everything he wants, and he wants a lot.
Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
Series: Celestial Bodies [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1850647
Comments: 4
Kudos: 90





	Behind Us the Moon, in a Welter of Blood

“I found him.” The words are a little breathless, stunned at his own success. Will looks up from his computer and into Hannibal’s gaze, raw excitement bleeding into a half-feral smile. Hannibal takes Will in, curious.

“And whom have you been searching for so ardently?”

“Clark Ingram. He’s going by Fred Smith now. Wanna go to Seattle?”

“For you, anywhere.”

It’s a relatively little thing to cross the border, all things said and considered. If Will were anyone else, he’d be disturbed at how easy it was to slip by the bored, overworked agent in their lane. The real test would be getting back to Vancouver. Or maybe they might cut their losses and the swing bench in the pool of the porch light and head south.

Hannibal is settled at a cafe table now, not looking at Will, leonine gaze resting on their quarry. “Patience, Will,” he murmurs, a completely indulgent smile playing on his lips. It’s getting dark quickly; a mild summer evening bleeding into night.

Will is placid and very still beside him, but the air between them is crackling, pure ozone before a lightning strike. He wants it. He wants it so badly he can already taste it on the back of his tongue, sharp and dark and seductive, uncut pomegranate juice. His eyes track the man as he ambles down the street from an office building towards a parking garage. Will can feel Hannibal beside him, reflecting his own anticipation. Or maybe he’s reflecting Hannibal’s. It’s the same.

They rise as one, stalking after him as soon as the man gets to the door of the garage. Will feels his heart begin to beat faster. He loves Hannibal so fiercely in moments like these. He's all dark power looming, a waking nightmare promising only blood and a full belly, and Will can’t help but mirror his other’s posture. This is beyond reckless, but it’s Clark Ingram at fucking last, finally. Will has spent the past four months idly searching for him once the idea sparked. Clark had gone to ground and across the country after, well, everything. The FBI never was so good at landing their catches. Will hasn’t technically forgiven Hannibal for holding the hammer of the gun all those years ago, and Will _wants_ Clark, wants to feel his skin split apart under his knife, see him begging and broken. Will’s mouth has gone dry with the yearning.

Ingram has almost reached his car when Will can feel him pick up on the fact that he’s being followed. He only gets the smallest thread of the psychopath’s latent guardedness, All-American mask firmly in place. Will will rip it off him.

“Hello?” Clark says, expecting the relative silence of the parking garage, just indulging his vague apprehension. His face is still the same insufferable tanned and careful blandness that Will is familiar with when Will and Hannibal stop at the trunk of his car. Ingram is caught awkwardly in a crouch to sit inside. He looks between them, clear recognition playing on those insipid WASP-y features, and Will at last feels fear closing Ingram’s throat. Will shows his teeth, shifting to inhabit Ingram’s impression of him.

“Hiii, Clark.” It’s drawn out, Will approaching a singsong tone of voice. Hannibal says nothing, watching Will raptly.

Ingram clears his throat. “I’m sorry, who are you? I’m Fred Smith, you must be mistaken.” He’s still got that smile, and Will wants nothing more than to tear it off his face and get to the bleeding, screaming fear underneath.

“No, you’re Clark Ingram. You killed sixteen women, tried to frame Peter Bernadorne for it, and you hurt his birds, so we’re going to go for a drive,” Will says easily.

He watches the realisation dawn over Ingram’s face: he wasn’t being followed. He was being hunted. All of his defensive instincts kick in, and an animal search for the exit fills his eyes. But he shows Clark the gun in his hand, as if he were showing him an ace.

“Hannibal’s not going to hold me back this time, so make it easy on yourself and let’s go for a drive.”

It’s such a rush, ecstasy to the edge of overwhelming, as Will is buffeted by Ingram’s fear and outrage and blank, shark-like malice, his own predatory power sweet in his mouth, and Hannibal’s mostly curious bloodlust. Will takes a deep breath. 

Ingram unlocks the car, and Will sits in the back, making a show of brandishing the gun, fitting easily into Ingram’s version of himself. The gun is honestly the very least of Ingram’s problems, but it’s a nice shorthand that he’s outmatched and very much out of his depth. Hannibal sits on the passenger side, fiddling with the radio, searching for something classical. Ingram’s hands grip the wheel as if he’s choking it before he puts the car in reverse. 

“Where are we going?” he says, attempting ease, but Will tastes stress closing his throat, and he knows by now Hannibal can smell it.

“You can take I-5, going north,” Will says, almost dismissively.

Ingram pulls out of the parking garage. Will can feel that he’s scrambling for some sort of salvation, some defensive maneuver to preserve his new shell of a life, but Will knows in his bones that it is never coming for Ingram.

It’s night now.

Everyone in the car is silent as they drive; vague classical music filling the space around them. Ingram is crawling out of his skin, All-American smile plastered in place but flickering. He’s blatantly planning some attack the moment he’s directed to pull over. Will absolutely savors it, almost wishes for it, unexpectedly delighting in the shared hope. He directs Ingram after at least an hour’s driving to take an exit. Turn after turn away from civilization, tension building in each chord from the radio, onto gravel and then dirt roads, until they are in the wilderness, quite alone.

“You can get out now,” Will says, and at the finality in his words the tension in the air severs with a dull, thick snap. Clark scrabbles for something near his feet and lunges. He almost has the knife to Hannibal’s chest when the gun goes off. Ingram cries out, pitching forward, and the car horn blares, echoing off the trees and nothing else.

Will and Hannibal are moving now, leaving their doors open against Ingram locking them out and escaping. Will drags him out into the darkness between the trees, the only light available spilling from the car’s overhead interior lights and the headlights. Will can feel that he and Hannibal must look hideous in the light, and he takes such a private, vicious joy in it that Hannibal casts him an appraising glance.

Ingram is still very much alive, a litany of prayers and bargains falling from his mouth, not quite directed at either of them. He struggles hard to get away, dragging his legs and clawing in the earth back towards the car. Will drinks it in, but he knows even this Ingram, debased and pleading, isn’t stripped of all his masks. He kicks Ingram savagely onto his back into the dirt, settles his weight immovably atop him. Will pulls his buck knife from his back pocket.

Hannibal merely watches once they have hauled him from the car; this is Will's design. He checks the gas level, turns off the engine and then settles comfortably on the back seat with the door open, quite content to witness Will in his extremes.

Ingram can’t quite move his legs due to the gunshot through his spine, mouth filled with blood. He tries his best, arms scrabbling against Will, pushing hard against his thighs on Ingram's chest, clawing desperately at Will's face, tearing at his hair. It’s absolutely no use. Will lets Hannibal’s bloodlust suffuse him, but more and more, he just lets himself go, using his —their— his self-satisfied brutality to pin Ingram where he lies openly sobbing in the soft leaf litter.

In the end, Will gets absolutely everything he wants; is glutted and very nearly sick on it.  
In the end, Clark Ingram is screaming and begging and crying and shitting himself.  
In the end, Will is very sure that what lies before him is the bleeding nub of the being beneath the All-American mask, only capable now of making broken sounds in his throat. They linger there, Will’s harsh, deep breaths audible through his teeth and the thing grunting almost soundlessly underneath him.

Will is caught, trapped in a feedback loop; utterly consumed by his work, the blood soaking him, and the form below him barely clinging to life and yet jerkily fighting for it, making inhuman sounds.

It’s Hannibal who nudges them forward.

“Will, as loath as I am to release this moment, there’s much left to be done and the night is getting old. At this point, we could be considered prurient if we continue. Let us end him, and be done and away,” he says, voice still calm. His gaze rests adoringly on the feral man before him utterly lost in his bloodlust and his prey.

Will tilts an ear to him, the only signal Hannibal is reaching him, not letting his gaze off the thing that had been Clark Ingram. He looks down at himself and all of the blood and bits of gristle and what he’s done. The form below him barely counts as a man any longer even as its heart still beats. He takes a breath. And then another. And another. Trapped again. Enamored.

“Will?” it’s... careful, from Hannibal, now standing just out of Will’s range of motion. Will can feel a bare, transient rush of concern, of --is it fear?-- from Hannibal.

It’s a long moment before Will answers, a strangled little sound escaping him as he stands up, shaken back into himself. He stares down and is caught anew.  
It’s Hannibal’s hand fisted into his shirt that grounds Will. Will draws as hard as he possibly can on Hannibal’s sense of purpose and calm. He sucks in a breath, casts his other a quick, scattered glance, before he bends one last time to his task. He cuts quickly, brutally. He shoves the kidneys, the heart and part of a lung into the plastic Hannibal has brought, and almost runs to the car.

They leave what remains for the animals to claim. It’s similar enough to a mauling, and it’s been a long and hungry winter.

Will wipes his hands on his pants. He tries to wipe his face, but only smears blood around and gives up. He shoves the knife into his front pocket before he climbs into the passenger seat. He stares out of the window, visibly bereft. He folds inwards, trying to resist bolting straight out of the car and back to the pile of meat on the ground. Hannibal takes his time settling into the driver’s seat, adjusting seat levers and the mirrors, fussing with the air conditioning, and then they’re driving with only the classical music and the sound of the road. Hannibal is focused on the drive, but he snatches glances every so often at Will’s fluttering eyelids and his hands shaking on his lap until they suddenly lie still against his thighs.

The comedown blindsides Will without mercy, presses him so much more heavily than any other time they’ve done this. It’s not the retreat Hannibal warned him against over Randall Tier’s body; nothing like the glint of the rail. It’s the mirrors in his mind: his empathy deliberately and intimately attuned to a particular subject and then abruptly, completely dark with the abyss of death. They flicker uselessly, reflecting the void infinitely against each other, until Will can shift them and set them to a light again. But the void is beautiful, in its own way, call and response complete in the reflection.

Will doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move, really, doesn’t seem to notice the stops Hannibal makes. He's pliable when Hannibal shifts them between cars; stays in the position he's placed in. When Hannibal leaves him for some immeasurable stretch of time (might only be an hour), Will feels the loss immolate him; he just can't quite do anything about it yet.

Hannibal has returned. Will works desperately to turn a few mirrors to literally anything but the yawning blackness before him, reaching out for anything human, his own self still subsumed.

Hannibal has parked and bundles him into a motel room. Hannibal wraps his coat around Will, hiding most of the blood. A duffle bag held tepidly before him hides the rest.

Will sits quietly on the edge of the bed, where he’s directed to sit. Drinks orange juice from the bottle held to his lips. Hannibal tenderly strips Will of his stiff, blood-dark clothes, and leads him by the hand into the shower. Hannibal washes him gently, not exactly quickly, dries him even more slowly. He tucks Will naked into the bed with a soft, deeply pleased little sound.

Will doesn’t surface until some time after he feels Hannibal’s weight and heat settle carefully behind him on the bed, a strong arm curled protectively around his chest. It’s just a touch of Will’s fingertips to that forearm; a little grateful stroke from the wrist down to the place where Hannibal cuffs his shirtsleeves when he's in the kitchen.

“Hello,” Hannibal says warmly.

“Scared of me,” says Will, voice thick and slow and Southern-accented with the effort it takes to speak. “In forest. Could feel it. Not his. Less. Gone quick. Was still there.” It takes Will a little longer to sort it all out. “Fear for and fear of. For lasted longer. “

“You were so breathtakingly radiant. It was hard to judge if I, too, would become an object of your lovely attention in the moment, and also to consider if I was ready to become that object,” Hannibal replies, pausing before he adds, “I have not felt genuine fear in such a long time. Consider it my gift; my contribution to the evening.” Hannibal presses his lips to the curls at the back of Will’s head.

“I wouldn’t do that to you. I— I knew who you were. Always. Even if everything else was blurred,” Will says, voice growing stronger, no accent now, more settled.

“More’s the pity,” Hannibal says simply.

Will turns his body to face Hannibal’s with real effort, sheltering himself in the warm, dark cave of his arms and chest. Hannibal obliges, gratified, arms encircling the smaller man easily.

“I just wish this didn’t happen. It’s never been that bad before,” says Will’s voice, rising muffled from the comforter. It’s an admission Will can’t make in the open air. Hannibal squeezes him gently.

“When one climbs to such dizzying heights, precipitous falls are to be expected. It is nothing to be ashamed of. I am happy to guide you home.” 

“You don’t fall, though,” says Will, after a long moment, envy shading his words.

“I am not you. Our shared experiences are both identical and quite different.”

A long, long stretch of silence, before Will offers hesitantly, “It was like nothing I’ve felt before. With— with the Dragon and everyone else, it was connecting with you. With Ingram, I was... me, and I was him, and I saw him and I saw me... and everything I did from one side I felt on the other. I deserved it, and felt it, and wanted it, and knew it. It was looking out of time and inside it as the killer and the killed both at once. Split, but whole. Infinite.” Even now, Will’s voice becomes hazy and thick.

“It is a very good thing that Clark Ingram is dead, because I could never forgive him this connection to you.” Hannibal’s arms close more tightly around Will, willing him back into the present, not only his jealousy motivating him. It’s a long moment before he continues, as generous as he can afford to be and a little more beside, voice low.

“You were and are the most beautiful creature that I have ever seen on this earth, Will.”

“Thanks for bringing me home.”

Will places a hand on his other's cheek, sliding it forward into his hair and cupping it, thumb caressing his ear. He pulls himself up, letting their bodies drag against each other and their legs twine together. He leans in, kissing Hannibal as Hannibal kisses, all greedy tongue and delicious little flashes of teeth against flesh.

Will very much dislikes being intimate when he’s in this state. His body is oversensitive, alien, acting and responding in ways that aren’t Will. It’s also perilously close to a memory from the handful of partners he’s had before; the time he’d been too drunk and then way too into it, slipping into his partner’s motions, self-moderation disastrously overcome.

Will feels like he's half-Hannibal (three-quarters if he’s honest) at the moment, nestled softly within his emotions and reflecting him almost completely as Will works his way back to himself. But Hannibal’s craving it and Will loves him, so Will indulges him.

Hannibal makes a deeply-satisfied noise in his chest, and his arm moves lower. His hand glides slowly, lightly, luxuriously down Will’s back, pulling Will's thigh over Hannibal’s own. His fingers just barely connect with sensitive skin, sending a not-quite painful thrill up Will's spine. It's meant to be dismissed in the larger movement; a little test, turned into a request if the test is acknowledged.

“You do know it’s like you’re fucking yourself when I’m like this,” Will sighs, forehead pressed to Hannibal’s, arms draping around his other's shoulders. It’s not quite a joke, and he isn’t quite irritated at it.

“Yes, and how incredibly exquisite: to so fully have myself in you,” Hannibal says, smiling at the joke, but it’s all up to Will, according to Hannibal’s tone.

“Narcissist.” It’s indulgent, giving Hannibal permission to continue.

He does, long fingers sliding, exploring, stroking Will to distraction as he's curled up against Hannibal, foreheads pressed together. Will has expected Hannibal to take advantage of his state and revel in his own private pleasures, same as he’s done on the perishingly few occasions Will has let him before. Will honestly wouldn’t mind, but Hannibal is touching, stroking Will as if Will were fully himself. He must—

Will can’t help his reactions being entirely reproductions of Hannibal’s, tongue pushing between his teeth to lick his lips, but it’s curious, and Will feels himself falling into a new feedback loop. Will producing Hannibal producing Will becoming--

Hannibal is still moving carefully, mindful of how wrung-out Will already is. He doesn't intend for this to take a long time or even be particularly strenuous. Will is caught: this could just be easy, even somewhat pleasurable for him. Instead, he finds himself dragging a thumbnail down Hannibal’s throat before his hand closes tightly around it.

“I already said yes, so take what you want. No holding back. No hiding from god, Hannibal,” he says, a challenge in the name, utterly Will.

Hannibal regards him, that part of him that’s not one enormous mirror right now, with such open adoration that Will feels it warm in his chest.

“Exquisite.”

Will finds himself on his back and dragged down the bed, scraping harshly against the sheets until his head hangs off the side. Whatever concern Hannibal had is banked, apparently for some time later.

Will looks up at the other man and sees his person suit tailored for Will shed from him, the courtesy offered against Will’s incessant, half-subconcious self-assessment, self-moderation. Despite the powerful desire to put the world away and just sleep; despite being already so overstimulated the sheets are really quite irritating; despite the fact he is hopelessly soft against his thigh, Will locks eyes with Hannibal. He smiles one of Hannibal’s little devil smiles and draws his thumb across his mouth, open in invitation, practically begging him to come and get it.

Hannibal is finally, blessedly done, and Will is washed up against him, half curled over him, partially to get away from the truly unbearable sheets and mostly to swim in his afterglow and fully-present calm. Hannibal keeps him close, arms very still around him.

“I love you,” Will says, voice hoarse.

“I know.”

Will sleeps like the dead.


End file.
